Hans Krása’s children's opera “Brundibár” has now come to be known throughout the world as a synonym for the music of Terezín, the ghetto in...

Hans Krása’s children's opera “Brundibár” has now come to be known throughout the world as a synonym for the music of Terezín, the ghetto in Northern Bohemia which gained its tragic fame as a “model concentration camp” in the 1940s by becoming an involuntary residence for Jewish intelligencia and countless Jewish artists deported by the Nazis (above all composers and musicians). The camp administration organised “recreational activities” to create a mock reality of Potemkin proportions for the international public, which became much, much more for the imprisoned participants in the regular concerts, presentations and theatre and opera performances: a recipe for survival. But the masks and curtains fell after the inglorious visit from the Red Cross in the autumn of 1944, which concluded in the presentation of several scenes from Brundibár: hundreds of artists were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, including the last cast of the children’s opera Brundibár, which by that time had put on no fewer than 55 performances in Terezín. Its creator Hans Krása arrived at the camp in 1943. Conductor Rafael Schächter, who was also interred there, succeeded in smuggling in Krása’s piano score from the opera (which had already been composed in Prague in 1938), and Krása proceeded to write a new full score for it. In this recording, eda records presented this Terezín version of this most magical children’s opera of the 20th century for the first time in German; it was accompanied by a radio feature by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick, in which the author recounts the biography of this musical gem and the life stories of several of its protagonists through the voices of contemporary witnesses.